By Jason M. Barr and Gerard Koeppel​Today, Manhattan is synonymous with its Cartesian configuration. Unlike a standard mathematical graph, which starts at the intersection of zero and zero, Manhattan “begins” at First Street and First Avenue (the “nexus of the universe,” according to Seinfeld’sKramer). From there, it’s a simple counting exercise north or west. The integer-based order creates the perception that Manhattan is a frozen lattice.

​Airports have a way of wearing out, of becoming prematurely bedraggled, haggard, and out-of-date. They are tired, tiring, and tiresome places where the architecture never makes the moment of arrival or departure grand or inviting. Dismal is the norm.

​​John F. Kennedy International Airport is no exception. First called Idlewild, it grew by accretion, adding privately held airline terminal buildings one after another, until the entire place was a mass of short circuits. Nothing connected, and with the exception of Eero Saarinen’s swooping TWA Terminal, nothing made the experience of flying a thrill. Delano and Aldrich’s original 1945 master plan had envisioned a single, shared terminal––an idea abandoned because neither the air carriers nor the bookkeepers liked it. By the mid-1980s, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which ran the airport, was again interested in the idea.

This is the last in a series of posts drawn from the authors'recent work ​Never Built New York, published courtesy of Metropolis Books.

​In 1967, Paul Rudolph was asked by the Ford Foundation to reimagine Robert Moses’s maligned but not yet dead Lower Manhattan Expressway (LOMEX), a Y-shaped link that would have connected the Williamsburg and Manhattan bridges to each other and to the Holland Tunnel. Opponents, led by activist and author Jane Jacobs, eventually killed the project (it was scrapped officially in 1971), saying that, in the name of urban renewal, it would eviscerate the neighborhood and ransack its residents.

This is the sixth in a series of posts drawn from the authors'recent work ​Never Built New York, published courtesy of Metropolis Books.

After Ellis Island was decommissioned in 1954 as the nation’s gateway to the world’s huddled masses, the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) chose an all-American path: opening the site to developers. According to author Vincent J. Cannato, some of the rebuffed ideas included a world trade center, a “college of the future,” housing for the elderly, a prison, and a resort.

The highest bid was $2.1 million, from the New York–based Damon Doudt Corporation, which in 1962 put down a deposit of $100,000. Headed by NBC radio and television announcer Jerry Damon and television director Elwood Doudt, the company offered a “completely self-contained city of the future,” designed by none other than recently deceased architectural master Frank Lloyd Wright. ​

This is the fifth in a series of posts drawn from the authors'recent work ​Never Built New York, published courtesy of Metropolis Books.

One of the most glorified skyscraper creators in Roaring Twenties America was Raymond Hood, who designed 30 Rockefeller Plaza, the McGraw-Hill Building, the Daily News Building, and the American Radiator Building in Manhattan, as well as the Tribune Tower in Chicago, and numerous other structures.

​Hood was obsessed with tackling congestion, which, by the 1920s and 1930s, had become an epidemic of unprecedented scope. In addition to outlining a City of Towers–spaced carefully above grassy open plazas and wide streets, increasing density without unduly increasing traffic–Hood looked to the waterfront, where his “apartment bridges” would similarly reduce crowding while providing a unique, water-focused lifestyle. ​

This is the fourth in a series of posts drawn from the authors'recent work ​Never Built New York, published courtesy of Metropolis Books.

Photo in "The New York Rapid Transit Railway Extensions," Engineering News, 1914

By Sam Lubell and Greg Goldin

The name Daniel Lawrence Turner means nothing to New Yorkers. But save for poor timing, he was almost the mastermind behind the most far-reaching subway plan ever proposed for New York City.

​Turner, chief engineer of the city’s Transit Construction Commission, was concerned by the alarming increase in traffic on the city’s street railways and trolleys, which, according to his estimates, had “nearly doubled every ten years.” Realizing the “necessity of an orderly development of rapid transit lines in all sections of the City,” and wanting to get ahead of development rather than follow it, in 1920 he submitted the “Report By The Chief Engineer Submitting For Consideration a Comprehensive Rapid Transit Plan Covering all Boroughs of the City of New York.”

This is the third in a series of posts drawn from the authors'recent work ​Never Built New York, published courtesy of Metropolis Books.

The notion of a civic center–a focus of the city’s public energies and an expression of its governmental purposes–was much discussed at the turn of the twentieth century. Daniel Burnham’s White City at the World’s Columbian Exposition, in Chicago, and Charles Mulford Robinson’s City Beautiful designs led a new generation to think about how to build modern-day equivalents of the Acropolis in ancient Greece. In the March 1902 edition of Municipal Affairs, ex-Congressman and lawyer John De Witt Warner declaimed, “New York’s greatest material lack... [of] one or more great civic centres... effectively grouped... public or quasipublic structures that are, as it were, the vital organs upon which its vigor and character must so largely depend.”

This is the second in a series of posts drawn from the authors'recent work ​Never Built New York, published courtesy of Metropolis Books.

The New Deal of the 1930s utterly transformed New York City, but most people hardly notice today. The landscape of public works created under the aegis of the Roosevelt Administration has become part of the backdrop of everyday life. But try to imagine the city without the Triborough Bridge, Lincoln Tunnel, and Henry Hudson Parkway and you get an idea of how much the city still owes to the New Deal. And there is so much more than those structures.